Word: potassium
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...bigger than a pack of cigarettes, the arsonists' bombs are expertly fashioned from a minuscule penlight battery, a wristwatch, a flashlight bulb and incendiary chemicals (potassium chlorate and potassium permanganate) that can be bought at local drug stores. Often tucked under a pile of fabrics in a crowded store, the minibombs are timed to flare after closing hour. In one day, four fires did $810,000 worth of damage to stores owned by U.S. merchants; unexploded devices have been found in the bathroom of a girls' school and, two weeks ago, at a U.S. Selective Service office...
...year-old potsherd to a 19th century vase. The technique employs the radiation-measuring devices used at most atomic reactors and in hospital radiotherapy departments. It is based on the fact that most mineral substances buried in the earth absorb the natural radiation given off by uranium, potassium and thorium in the earth. The rate of radiation has been relatively constant in historical times, but all absorbed radiation is released when the substance is heated...
Three times between 1962 and 1965, French astronomers reported that apparently ordinary dwarf stars had emitted extremely bright and unprecedented potassium flares. As evidence, they pointed to three different dwarf-star spectrograms made at the Haute Provence Observatory in Southern France. They showed inexplicably strong potassium-emission lines...
...group of University of California astronomers ran their own tests at California's Lick Observatory. No luck. Then someone had a bright idea. While working with the same spectrographic equipment that the French had used to examine the dwarf starlight, one of the astronomers struck a match. Voilal Potassium lines! The Californians' conclusion, reported in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific: the potassium "flares" were probably produced when French smokers-not dwarf stars...
...selfadmitted members of exile organizations such as Alpha 66, and said they had been paid by the American government to carry out operations against the revolutionary regime. Extremely sophisticated radio transmission equipment was captured with the commandos. One group had brought a pistol and silencer with bullets dipped in potassium cyanide. The CIA's involvement with Cuban exiles may only extend as far as financing intelligence-- gathering operations, and its payments may only be a means of exercising some control over anti-Castro groups. The Cuban government, of course, takes a more sanguine view of the supposed link...